Julianne Moore Was Fired From An Oscar-Nominated Movie Over A Fake Nose

With all due respect to SNL‘s “ham” sketch, Melissa McCarthy gave a career-best performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me? She was nominated for Best Actress, while her co-star Richard E. Grant and the film’s screenwriters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty also received some Oscars love (even if they all lost in their respective categories). But McCarthy wasn’t the original choice to bring Lee Israel, a struggling author who forged letters from celebrated writers, to the big screen. Julianne Moore had the role, until she was fired from the project.

“I didn’t leave that movie. Nicole fired me,” the actress said earlier this month on Watch What Happens Live. “I think she didn’t like what I was doing. We’d been rehearsing and doing pre-production stuff, and I think her idea of what the character was was different than where my idea of the character was.” That’s only half the story, though: Moore wasn’t fired six days before production began because she was doing a bad job; the disagreement was over a fake nose.

What were those ideas? [The Hollywood Reporter] has learned from sources that while there were several creative choices they didn’t see eye to eye on, the biggest was that Moore, 58, wanted to wear a prosthetic nose for the part — Israel, who died at 75 in 2014, had a somewhat bulbous schnoz — while Holofcener, also 58, is said to have felt that a fake nose would be too distracting. (Via)